GoldWave is a feature-rich commercial digital audio editing software developed by GoldWave Inc. It was first released to the public in April 1993, and is similar to applications like the open source Audacity, though offering powerful features at a very reasonable cost.

A version prior to the version 5 series still exists for download at the official website. All versions up to 4.26 can run on any Windows operating machine thus requiring a moderately fast computer to handle the program at it's best. But since 2004, GoldWave has evolved into a new era, changing from version 4 to 5, updating its visual aspect and introducing much more rich editing features and special effects, with the counter-effect of leaving old Windows versions compatibility such as 95, 98, 98SE obsolete (although GoldWave will still run on Windows 98SE, albeit unsupported) and render the software unusable on those systems. Also, the system requirements have increased considerably since now a Pentium 3 of 700 MHz and DirectX 8 are part of the minimum equipment required compared to the Pentium 2 of 300 MHz and DirectX 5. In some of the old shareware versions such as 4.13 you could continue editing as long as you like. You could perform 100 actions per session. After that a notification would be displayed for every operation. Fortunately you could just save your work and restart the program and you would once again be able to perform another 100 actions. There were no limitations in repeating this.